I'm only 21. My life has been short compared to many who are twice my age, but through my life experiences, I have learned that certain stereotypes of people that we take for granted to be true are, in fact, absolutely false.
I've learned that the stereotype of the "just drug my kid up and get him back in school" parent doesn't exist. The vast majority of parents care about their children and wish to make educated decisions regarding them, especially when it involves psychiatric drugs. I've learned this with a sister who is a Psychologist. I've learned this through extended family that have an autistic child, who are also very active with other autistic parents in the community. I've learned this through reading all about the issues.
I've learned that the stereotype of country-folk that are dumb or uneducated, but are loving, hospitable people is false. Growing up in the US, you always see images of small towns, where people may not be rich or well educated, but they grew up with strong Christian (actual Christianity, not the bigotry practiced by some vocal people today) values and are kind, hospitable people. My work this summer has me directly interacting with those very people, however, knocking on their doors for science. We're not selling anything, we just want to install some scientific instruments on a small 10ft x 10ft bit of their unused land (in 99% of cases, these farmers with hundreds of acres of land have huge fields of weed-land that is unused), but all they care about is how quickly we're going to go away or how much money they think they deserve.
I'm willing to challenge the taken-for-granted idea that if people had to pay for their own health care, with only catastrophic health problems and hospital visits being free, they would simply wait for catastrophe to strike. Medicine isn't perfect. It's a lot easier to treat strep throat than it is once it goes into scarlet fever, an strep throat isn't going to leave permanent damage. People know this. Nobody likes to be sick, and everybody is also keenly aware of the consequences of diseases when they are allowed to spread too far. There are many healthy people who have had nary a problem, but almost every person in the US has a friend or relative who have had serious health problems that affect their lives forever. Given the option of a doctor visit that is reasonably priced (like, $20 instead of $150) and whose prices are clearly presented prior to treatment (as opposed to the doctor doing whatever they want, and then presenting you with a bill afterward), I am willing to believe that nearly everyone would go to the doctor as soon as possible. The consequences of waiting too long could not only long-affect your health, but you'll also be missing too many days from work.
Sure, there will be a very few that do wait for catastrophe to happen, but those people are the same wastes that we're already paying food stamps and welfare to sit on their ass and smoke pot every day. I also have a waste such as this in my extended family. She refused to purchase health insurance for her pregnancy (which covers 100% of the hospital birth cost) -- a $5 insurance policy (yes, $5, you read that correctly, it's only for destitute people) -- because she thought that it should be provided to her for free. She also has been in and out of shitty Wal-Mart and waitress jobs, and basically parties, smokes pot, and leeches off of her family. If these sorts of people waited for catastrophe before a doctor visit, they would likely be subject the same kind of below-average care that they currently are, and the situation wouldn't change much.
The Foxconn plant issues are typical of plants in China, where the employees make dollars a day and work 80 hour weeks and the owner makes millions and drives a Mercedes-Benz.
This is not capitalism in action. This is greed in action.
A local Honda supplier plant here in Central Indiana that makes engines for North American Honda Civics and where the president of said plant makes less than 5x the amount of the workers is capitalism in action. Indiana automotive workers are part of capitalism in action and are not treated in the same manner as Chinese workers. Honda engines could be made in China for significantly less, but they aren't, and that is also capitalism in action.
I disagree. IMO, this article is a fearmongering report attemping to get people to realize their shiat is being stolen all the time, yo, hire some good security experts, and lock down their secret resources, research, and information before everyone and their brother (or at least our up-and-coming biggest rival China) has it.
And I think that trying to instill a new appreciation for just how secure we should strive to be with our IT is a noble cause.
I keep seeing this attitude again, and again, and again, and again, and again everywhere. It's like people think that BP is just trying to ignore the problem and never fix it.
BP is not a Captain Planet villain
BP is saddled with the cleanup bill. It's not like BP woke up one day and thought, "What should I do, today.... I know, let's have an oil spill! I think a $3.5 billion cleanup bill would be great for our fiscal year!"
Whether or not BP was irresponsible in causing the oil spill or not is irrelevant to the plugging and cleanup of the spill. BP does not have any interest dilly-dallying around and waiting for the oil spill to get bigger. They are trying -- and failing, but nevertheless trying -- to stop the spill, and they have zero interest in prolonging the leak (unless they really want to pay the govt billions more, which they probably don't).
The author didn't state it elegantly, but he still made the point -- Chinese industrial espionage is very real, is here now, and it is state-sponsored. China views hacking not only as a fast-track to becoming an industrial superpower, but they view it as a method of becoming a military superpower, too. A good part of China's military buildup involves locating and training talented young people, as well as hiring the already established hacker-underground folk for military purposes. They figure (probably correctly) that they are nowhere near capable of competing with the US military on a technological front, but if they can shut down our command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) networks (not coincidentally, this is also why they developed the satellite-killing missile), then they have essentially shut us down, especially for any military response to an attack on Taiwan.
Here are just a few examples of the many, many already known about cases of Chinese espionage. - The infamous Cox Report (regarding the PRC stealing our most advanced nuclear weapon designs) - The well-known Google attacks - A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC - The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC. - The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage. For example, high-profile UK businessmen have been approached by PRC spies with lavish gifts which include USB flash drives infected with trojans to steal information, and in 2008, an aide to Gordon Brown had his Blackberry stolen after a sexy Chinese woman approached him in Beijing -- a classic, almost too classic to be true, Soviet-style tactic. Other diplomats, too, have been sexually blackmailed by the PRC to divulge information. - Here is a research paper by Northrop Grumman regarding China's cyber-warfare abilities, 88 pages filled with the stuff. Turn to page 67 for a "Timeline of Significant Chinese Related Cyber Events 1999-Present," let alone the details of the rest of the paper which shows the large effort by the PRC to improve their cyber-warfare and espionage abilities.
The MI5 report described how China’s computer hacking campaign had attacked British defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as public relations companies and international law firms. The document explicitly warned British executives dealing with China against so-called honey trap methods in which it said the Chinese tried to cultivate personal relationships, “often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” either within China or abroad.
“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it warned. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”
Interestingly enough, Richard Feynman was also the topic of an article in the latest edition of APS News. The article discusses Richard Feynman's artistic life in addition to his Physics life.
The PS3 has done extremely well in the anti-piracy department. As have the newer versions of the PSP.
Of course, one could then make the argument that the PS3 is protected by an expensive media format, and both the PS3 and newer PSPs are protected by a lack of interest to hack them.
I totally agree with you, Max. I have HUGE library of SNES, N64, and PSX games. My library of GCN and PS2 games is a little smaller, and my library of Wii games is less than 10. I'm tired of shelling out an increasing amount of money for ports of games (Chrono Trigger DS for $40? I bought it because I'm a fanboy, but **** you, too, Square-Enix) and increasingly shitty flagship titles (FFXIII was the my last straw for the Final Fantasy series).
I've grown cynical of anything that any of the new games that the big publishers are putting out because all they've been doing for nearly two software generations, now, is taking a formula that worked 15 years ago and applying it over, and over, and over, and over again. The last game I bought for the DS was Black Sigil from a small startup Canadian company. It was new, and it was awesome. Other games from the big publishers, I just download them. They're either rehashes or they're boring.
But you know, when you think about it, how many of you have actually beaten the games that you've pirated? For me, I play pirated games for an hour, maybe two, and then I'm done. Most people I know do the same thing with their downloaded games. Piracy is less about getting games you're interested in for free and more about basically replacing what game demos used to be. Game demos used to be long, and you could play them for a while for entertainment once, and then you'd either really like the game and buy it, or you'd have had fun wasting some time and never play it again. That's how I see the current trend of piracy. Most people who pirate play the pirated game for a short waste of time and then they're done. Without a DS flash cart, they wouldn't have instead bought the game, they'd have just instead played nothing at all.
You're mistaken. AU Optronics is a Taiwanese company. And even if you're a stubborn, nationalistic Chinese citizen, you still have to cede that the Republic of China (Taiwan) adheres to international law significantly better than the People's Republic of China (China); Taiwan is at the very least as respectable in the technology field as South Korea, if not more so.
I keep seeing this argument that the use of HTML 5 and the use of Flash is mutually exclusive. I understand that HTML 5 has video and some basic animation capabilities, but how, exactly, does this spell the end of Flash? Flash is a tremendously useful development platform, and it has many more capabilities than just online video.
Healthfood sucks. Seriously. I lived in Japan for a year. I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and as much as I wanted. and I still lost weight. American junk food has to be some of the grossest, fattening food on the planet (and the most delicious, but that's another story). Sure, I would like to eat healthily, though, like I did in Japan, but what options does that give me? I can eat a salad..... or a different salad. I can go to a restaurant with a menu of salads. I suppose there are sandwiches, too. So now we're up to two choices when I want to eat healthy.
In Japan, nearly everything is healthier and lighter than its American equivalent, including the fried food. There are terribly unhealthy choices, too, but there are as many ways to eat reasonably healthy food over there as there are types of fast food in America. Americans do not have an aversion to health food, they have an aversion to eating the same shitty, expensive health food every day.
Signed, Everyone outside of the East and West Coasts that doesn't have delicious, cheap, and many varieties of healthy or moderately-healthy food.
Sharp just built a new $4.6 billion LCD facility in Sakai, Japan that is capable of producing more, cheaper, and more advanced LCDs than anyone else in the world. This plant has helped them produce 10th generation glass substrates with UV2A technology that most other LCD companies will be purchasing from them. They are also going out on a whim and pioneering the new RGBY technology for an increased color gamut. I believe I've heard that Sony co-funded this research, so we're likely to see RGBY sets from Sony in the future, too.
Make no mistake, the Korean companies have "dominated" the LCD market, but that depends on your definition of dominate. Samsung has premiere floor space at about every major retailer, but I'm fairly certain that's more due to marketing and back-room deals than anything else. Sony has been making technically superior (white LED,lighting, for instance, and therefore costlier) TVs to Samsung for years, and I'm not the only one with Samsung quality issues (18 pages, the size of that page is unbelievable).
And in the field of professional displays, I don't think anyone would say that Korea is doing what we'd call, "dominate".
I remember during the DOS days, a game demo would consist of the ENTIRE first world, or an hour or so, or something. You'd play it, get hooked, and then it's ask you to pay for the full game You'd want to pay because you just spent probably a good part of an hour getting into the game, and now you want to play the rest of the awesome game.
Enter today's age of out-of-touch-with-reality game corporations. If you play the demo of Mega Man 9 on the PSN network, it lets you play one stage, and then as soon as you enter the boss gates, it stops and asks you to pay for the full game. What the hell? I don't even get to fight the boss at the end of a Mega Man stage? Fuck that.
How many of us grew up wanting to be scientists an engineers because we thought NASA was the coolest thing since the Super Nintendo?
We have a terrible shortage of scientists in the US and a culture that ill-supports our nerdy kids. NASA serves an an inspiration not only to them, but to children all over the planet to get into the sciences and excel. The trickle-down technologies that come from NASA research are just a bonus.
Japan's been researching this sort of thing for hundreds of years. This is actually in perfect timing with my senior project in Japanese; I translated a textbook article about the history of the relationship between catfish and earthquakes in Japan. Catfish are the popular ones there, and once upon a time they actually were assumed to cause the earthquakes.
It's basically non-scientific common knowledge over there that some animals can predict earthquakes in some form. According to the textbook, people from seaside countries all over the Pacific are well aware that before a large earthquake, odd animal behavior occurs. That often manifests itself as animals being suddenly and uncharacteristically unruly, swarms of deep-sea fish pooling near the surface of the ocean, rodents appearing out of nowhere, snakes suddenly coming out of hibernation, or all other sorts of things of that nature.
A scientist in the early 1900s, Dr. Shinkishi Hatai, hypothesized that the reason catfish went so berserk shortly before an earthquake is that they could detect minute changes in Earth's telluric current. Another famous Japanese geophysicist, Dr. Torahiko Terada, apparently dedicated his thesis to, and showed a very convincing correlation between the 1930 Horse Mackerel catches and the Ito Seismic Swarm at that time.
Realistically, if you're making the gas chambers then you have decided your moral position by the business you are in. If you are making the actual tools of killing then there's a case that you have a moral duty to take care over how they will be used. But the further you get from that then the more your moral responsibility is diluted, to the point where it's lost in the noise.
And that's exactly the issue, here. Most people likely wouldn't care if China was somehow using existing Microsoft services to send disinformation and propaganda to their citizens. It's the fact that China is saying, "Please modify your existing software so that it sends disinformation and propaganda to our citizens," and Microsoft is saying, "Ok, sure. What kind of censorship would you like us to make for you?"
Regarding the wagonmakers analogy -- it's upsetting, but not a big deal if Nazis are using a wagonmaker's wagons to transport Jews to a fiery death. That's not the wagonmaker's fault, necessarily. What Microsoft is doing, though, is making a Jew-transporting wagon that is engineered for the purpose of sending Jews to their fiery death.
Seeing that I have been through public, private, AND home schooling, and I come from an extended family of both gifted and special needs children where home schooling has been really beneficial, I feel the need to chime in.
Definitely not all home schoolers are home schooled because of religious fanaticism. If I had to guess, I would say that most home schooled children are schooled that way because of a poor education at public/private schools. That poor education can go both ways -- a gifted child might not be stimulated enough at school, or a child with learning disabilities might not be taught at their ability to learn.
Home schooling is news for nerds because it is a topic that hits close to home for many of us. Many Slashdot readers have been home schooled or will home school their children, and I would venture to guess that the reason for that is because most of us here are not normal. Most of us here were not the popular kids at school, and while others preoccupied themselves with sleeping with as many people as possible or skateboarding, many of us watched the Discovery Channel.
Home schooling in and of itself isn't bad. Freedom to teach whatever you want lies at the very heart of home schooling. Parents are free to choose how to educate their children. There will be bad parents, average parents, and great parents, and passing legislation through in order to stop bad parents from badly parenting is as bad of an idea as passing legislation in order to stop parents from teaching children weird religions.
I, myself, have been home schooled, and I have also gone to public and private schools. I have met many people that were horrified that my parents could do something so terrible as to home school me; those sorts of people usually insinuate that home schooling destroys a child's capacity to interact with others socially and ruins them for the real world. In fact, with siblings 6 and 8 years my senior, I have always acted two or three grades more mature than my age, leaving me constantly outcast at typical schools. Being interested in science also further outcast me from having friends in public and private schools. My being home schooled has allowed me to enter my university at an early age (age 13 -- big thanks to IUPUI's fantastic SPAN program); unlike in primary schools, I am comfortable in a University setting, with much more freedom than in primary schools; because of my freedom, I was able to act on an opportunity to study abroad for 1 year; and despite my parents destroying my social abilities by home schooling me, I have been given awards for being a top student by my university, I have been accepted for a Summer Governor's Internship, and I have interned at NASA. This next year, I will be looking forward to entering graduate school for a PhD. in Geophysics.
I am not the only one with stories like this. IUPUI's SPAN program was created in order to help students like myself whose needs weren't being met by traditional schools. After my successful entrance into college at age 13, my aunt and uncle also took my cousin out of primary schools and enrolled him into the same university. He'll be moving on to a graduate degree in Electrical Engineering after next year. And another cousin, who has moderate Asperger's (among other behavioral problems), has always had terrible trouble fitting in at school and being taught in a way that he is able to learn. He didn't enroll in a university early, but his parents took advantage of many of the services and academies that cater to home schooled special needs and gifted children. This fall, he has been accepted for a full ride to a nice, private engineering university that is excited to have him in their Civil Engineering department.
Home schooling is not a bad thing. Like anything in life, there will be people who responsibly home school and people who irresponsibly home school. Stringent legislation will not prevent religious fanatic
I forget the case, but some judge already convicted a guy for the possession of "sexually-explicit e-mails" -- literary depictions of child pornography. If I recall, it was a case that had to do with a guy that had a shit-ton of shota manga, and he was convicted for the possession of child pornography over the manga and the "sexually-explicit" e-mails (which contained no images or ascii art -- just text).
It's amazing how quickly the constitution is shred into a fine pulp and turned into toilet paper when one doesn't have a good lawyer, or when the "child" prefix is applied to a crime.
Over the summer, I had the privilege to intern at NASA. Every little scientist's dream is to grow up and work for NASA, and I accomplished that dream for a short time. Why do kids dream of growing up to work for NASA? Because NASA is super-cool, and it does things that nobody else thought was possible or reasonable to do. It does crazy, impossible things just because it can, and to show the world that it can.
How many of you, growing up, were highly interested in space? How cool did you think NASA was? Just about every scientist I know says that they loved space and NASA as kids, and it's part of what made them interested in science. Though going to the moon has little to no hard, monetary return, the return that it does have is priceless -- inspiration for multiple new generations of children to grow up into scientists to work their hardest and do things that we think now are impossible.
Without NASA and billions of dollars spent into producing pretty pictures of galaxies and producing wild stories of the creation of planets, it will be a lot harder to convince children that the sometimes-unbearable difficulty and mundanity of science is worth the effort.
Until this latest fiasco, it has been unthinkable that a company would pull out of China. Companies have done so for human rights issues in the past (1990s), only to come back later in the decade. There's a general notion that foreign companies "need" China, and the Chinese government and Chinese people have become aware and arrogant of this fact. Most in China believe that Google is just doing what us Westerns know that the PRC does all the time -- blow off steam, make some noise, and continue business as usual.
There has been an increasing amount of articles in journals and newspapers discussing the possibility that though we have traditionally thought that we can't live without China, many businesses have starting to think that they can't live with China. Combined with its worsening human rights record, its worsening censorship, and its increasing disregard for anyone and anything but its own interests, the PRC government has been repeatedly sending the message that "play nice with us, no matter how much you dislike it, or you can't have a piece of our billion person pie". Google is sending the message that "you're pissing us off and we're thinking that it may no longer be worth it".
The point I'm trying to make, here, is that nobody has thought that a company would seriously consider pulling out of China since the 90s. The fact that Google is seriously considering leaving the country is groundbreaking, and it's something that companies all over the world are watching carefully. And for those that saying that it wouldn't matter to China if Google pulled out -- you're just being cynical. Google is no minor player in China. If their market share is actually 30%, as reported, that's more 115 million Chinese internet users, and that's better than Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, and AOL in the US combined.
With a project of this scale, and with the wallet and determination of the Chinese government, it's more than likely that an advanced Western IT company is going to be helping out with this monitoring task. They helped out with Iran, after all, which is much more taboo than helping out China.
Fundamentally the question cannot be answered as long as we cling to preconceived notions of what it means to be a man or a woman. "Man" is a social construct -- and from a scientific perspective there is no clear way to deliniate(sp?) between male and female. You can claim genetics determines that, and I'll show you XX men and XY women. You claim genitalia, I'll reply with birth defects. Any such distinction is arbitrary, and claims to the contrary are unscientific. The either/or proposition of gender and sex are social constructs. I'd also like to remind you that there are no studies proving that intelligence has any survival advantage whatsoever.
You can show me exceptions all day to what is usually defined as "males" and "females", but that's exactly what they are -- exceptions. If you have a room with one million classical "males", one million classical "females", and an XX male and an XY female, it doesn't mean that "male" and "female" have no meaning because the latter two exist. Biology is not Mathematics. One example of a falsehood doesn't collapse the whole idea.
I don't know what world you live in, but the one I live in, regardless of whether or not they go to school or have a career, most (not all) women eventually want to raise children of their own. In an ideal world, women could raise children AND have a career. We live far away from an ideal world on a place called Earth, where months out of work are a serious setback, and where raising kids well AND dealing with workplace responsibilities is impossible unless you sleep 2 hours a day.
You had me until Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
Oppression does not require the support of the majority. Do you think North Koreans like their government? Oppression requires nothing but a small amount of brutal people in power and just enough authority, whether that be authority by loyalty or authority by fear, to enforce their oppression.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm only 21. My life has been short compared to many who are twice my age, but through my life experiences, I have learned that certain stereotypes of people that we take for granted to be true are, in fact, absolutely false.
I've learned that the stereotype of the "just drug my kid up and get him back in school" parent doesn't exist. The vast majority of parents care about their children and wish to make educated decisions regarding them, especially when it involves psychiatric drugs. I've learned this with a sister who is a Psychologist. I've learned this through extended family that have an autistic child, who are also very active with other autistic parents in the community. I've learned this through reading all about the issues.
I've learned that the stereotype of country-folk that are dumb or uneducated, but are loving, hospitable people is false. Growing up in the US, you always see images of small towns, where people may not be rich or well educated, but they grew up with strong Christian (actual Christianity, not the bigotry practiced by some vocal people today) values and are kind, hospitable people. My work this summer has me directly interacting with those very people, however, knocking on their doors for science. We're not selling anything, we just want to install some scientific instruments on a small 10ft x 10ft bit of their unused land (in 99% of cases, these farmers with hundreds of acres of land have huge fields of weed-land that is unused), but all they care about is how quickly we're going to go away or how much money they think they deserve.
I'm willing to challenge the taken-for-granted idea that if people had to pay for their own health care, with only catastrophic health problems and hospital visits being free, they would simply wait for catastrophe to strike. Medicine isn't perfect. It's a lot easier to treat strep throat than it is once it goes into scarlet fever, an strep throat isn't going to leave permanent damage. People know this. Nobody likes to be sick, and everybody is also keenly aware of the consequences of diseases when they are allowed to spread too far. There are many healthy people who have had nary a problem, but almost every person in the US has a friend or relative who have had serious health problems that affect their lives forever. Given the option of a doctor visit that is reasonably priced (like, $20 instead of $150) and whose prices are clearly presented prior to treatment (as opposed to the doctor doing whatever they want, and then presenting you with a bill afterward), I am willing to believe that nearly everyone would go to the doctor as soon as possible. The consequences of waiting too long could not only long-affect your health, but you'll also be missing too many days from work.
Sure, there will be a very few that do wait for catastrophe to happen, but those people are the same wastes that we're already paying food stamps and welfare to sit on their ass and smoke pot every day. I also have a waste such as this in my extended family. She refused to purchase health insurance for her pregnancy (which covers 100% of the hospital birth cost) -- a $5 insurance policy (yes, $5, you read that correctly, it's only for destitute people) -- because she thought that it should be provided to her for free. She also has been in and out of shitty Wal-Mart and waitress jobs, and basically parties, smokes pot, and leeches off of her family. If these sorts of people waited for catastrophe before a doctor visit, they would likely be subject the same kind of below-average care that they currently are, and the situation wouldn't change much.
The Foxconn plant issues are typical of plants in China, where the employees make dollars a day and work 80 hour weeks and the owner makes millions and drives a Mercedes-Benz.
This is not capitalism in action. This is greed in action.
A local Honda supplier plant here in Central Indiana that makes engines for North American Honda Civics and where the president of said plant makes less than 5x the amount of the workers is capitalism in action. Indiana automotive workers are part of capitalism in action and are not treated in the same manner as Chinese workers. Honda engines could be made in China for significantly less, but they aren't, and that is also capitalism in action.
I disagree. IMO, this article is a fearmongering report attemping to get people to realize their shiat is being stolen all the time, yo, hire some good security experts, and lock down their secret resources, research, and information before everyone and their brother (or at least our up-and-coming biggest rival China) has it.
And I think that trying to instill a new appreciation for just how secure we should strive to be with our IT is a noble cause.
I keep seeing this attitude again, and again, and again, and again, and again everywhere. It's like people think that BP is just trying to ignore the problem and never fix it.
BP is not a Captain Planet villain
BP is saddled with the cleanup bill. It's not like BP woke up one day and thought, "What should I do, today.... I know, let's have an oil spill! I think a $3.5 billion cleanup bill would be great for our fiscal year!"
Whether or not BP was irresponsible in causing the oil spill or not is irrelevant to the plugging and cleanup of the spill. BP does not have any interest dilly-dallying around and waiting for the oil spill to get bigger. They are trying -- and failing, but nevertheless trying -- to stop the spill, and they have zero interest in prolonging the leak (unless they really want to pay the govt billions more, which they probably don't).
Nobody wants an oil spill, and that includes BP.
The author didn't state it elegantly, but he still made the point -- Chinese industrial espionage is very real, is here now, and it is state-sponsored. China views hacking not only as a fast-track to becoming an industrial superpower, but they view it as a method of becoming a military superpower, too. A good part of China's military buildup involves locating and training talented young people, as well as hiring the already established hacker-underground folk for military purposes. They figure (probably correctly) that they are nowhere near capable of competing with the US military on a technological front, but if they can shut down our command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) networks (not coincidentally, this is also why they developed the satellite-killing missile), then they have essentially shut us down, especially for any military response to an attack on Taiwan.
Here are just a few examples of the many, many already known about cases of Chinese espionage.
- The infamous Cox Report (regarding the PRC stealing our most advanced nuclear weapon designs)
- The well-known Google attacks
- A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC
- The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC.
- The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage. For example, high-profile UK businessmen have been approached by PRC spies with lavish gifts which include USB flash drives infected with trojans to steal information, and in 2008, an aide to Gordon Brown had his Blackberry stolen after a sexy Chinese woman approached him in Beijing -- a classic, almost too classic to be true, Soviet-style tactic. Other diplomats, too, have been sexually blackmailed by the PRC to divulge information.
- Here is a research paper by Northrop Grumman regarding China's cyber-warfare abilities, 88 pages filled with the stuff. Turn to page 67 for a "Timeline of Significant Chinese Related Cyber Events 1999-Present," let alone the details of the rest of the paper which shows the large effort by the PRC to improve their cyber-warfare and espionage abilities.
Here are some more excerpts:
MI5 Report
The MI5 report described how China’s computer hacking campaign had attacked British defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as public relations companies and international law firms. The document explicitly warned British executives dealing with China against so-called honey trap methods in which it said the Chinese tried to cultivate personal relationships, “often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” either within China or abroad.
“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it warned. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”
Interestingly enough, Richard Feynman was also the topic of an article in the latest edition of APS News. The article discusses Richard Feynman's artistic life in addition to his Physics life.
The PS3 has done extremely well in the anti-piracy department. As have the newer versions of the PSP.
Of course, one could then make the argument that the PS3 is protected by an expensive media format, and both the PS3 and newer PSPs are protected by a lack of interest to hack them.
I totally agree with you, Max. I have HUGE library of SNES, N64, and PSX games. My library of GCN and PS2 games is a little smaller, and my library of Wii games is less than 10. I'm tired of shelling out an increasing amount of money for ports of games (Chrono Trigger DS for $40? I bought it because I'm a fanboy, but **** you, too, Square-Enix) and increasingly shitty flagship titles (FFXIII was the my last straw for the Final Fantasy series).
I've grown cynical of anything that any of the new games that the big publishers are putting out because all they've been doing for nearly two software generations, now, is taking a formula that worked 15 years ago and applying it over, and over, and over, and over again. The last game I bought for the DS was Black Sigil from a small startup Canadian company. It was new, and it was awesome. Other games from the big publishers, I just download them. They're either rehashes or they're boring.
But you know, when you think about it, how many of you have actually beaten the games that you've pirated? For me, I play pirated games for an hour, maybe two, and then I'm done. Most people I know do the same thing with their downloaded games. Piracy is less about getting games you're interested in for free and more about basically replacing what game demos used to be. Game demos used to be long, and you could play them for a while for entertainment once, and then you'd either really like the game and buy it, or you'd have had fun wasting some time and never play it again. That's how I see the current trend of piracy. Most people who pirate play the pirated game for a short waste of time and then they're done. Without a DS flash cart, they wouldn't have instead bought the game, they'd have just instead played nothing at all.
You're mistaken. AU Optronics is a Taiwanese company. And even if you're a stubborn, nationalistic Chinese citizen, you still have to cede that the Republic of China (Taiwan) adheres to international law significantly better than the People's Republic of China (China); Taiwan is at the very least as respectable in the technology field as South Korea, if not more so.
I keep seeing this argument that the use of HTML 5 and the use of Flash is mutually exclusive. I understand that HTML 5 has video and some basic animation capabilities, but how, exactly, does this spell the end of Flash? Flash is a tremendously useful development platform, and it has many more capabilities than just online video.
Healthfood sucks. Seriously. I lived in Japan for a year. I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and as much as I wanted. and I still lost weight. American junk food has to be some of the grossest, fattening food on the planet (and the most delicious, but that's another story). Sure, I would like to eat healthily, though, like I did in Japan, but what options does that give me? I can eat a salad..... or a different salad. I can go to a restaurant with a menu of salads. I suppose there are sandwiches, too. So now we're up to two choices when I want to eat healthy.
In Japan, nearly everything is healthier and lighter than its American equivalent, including the fried food. There are terribly unhealthy choices, too, but there are as many ways to eat reasonably healthy food over there as there are types of fast food in America. Americans do not have an aversion to health food, they have an aversion to eating the same shitty, expensive health food every day.
Signed,
Everyone outside of the East and West Coasts that doesn't have delicious, cheap, and many varieties of healthy or moderately-healthy food.
Sharp just built a new $4.6 billion LCD facility in Sakai, Japan that is capable of producing more, cheaper, and more advanced LCDs than anyone else in the world. This plant has helped them produce 10th generation glass substrates with UV2A technology that most other LCD companies will be purchasing from them. They are also going out on a whim and pioneering the new RGBY technology for an increased color gamut. I believe I've heard that Sony co-funded this research, so we're likely to see RGBY sets from Sony in the future, too.
Make no mistake, the Korean companies have "dominated" the LCD market, but that depends on your definition of dominate. Samsung has premiere floor space at about every major retailer, but I'm fairly certain that's more due to marketing and back-room deals than anything else. Sony has been making technically superior (white LED,lighting, for instance, and therefore costlier) TVs to Samsung for years, and I'm not the only one with Samsung quality issues (18 pages, the size of that page is unbelievable).
And in the field of professional displays, I don't think anyone would say that Korea is doing what we'd call, "dominate".
I remember during the DOS days, a game demo would consist of the ENTIRE first world, or an hour or so, or something. You'd play it, get hooked, and then it's ask you to pay for the full game You'd want to pay because you just spent probably a good part of an hour getting into the game, and now you want to play the rest of the awesome game.
Enter today's age of out-of-touch-with-reality game corporations. If you play the demo of Mega Man 9 on the PSN network, it lets you play one stage, and then as soon as you enter the boss gates, it stops and asks you to pay for the full game. What the hell? I don't even get to fight the boss at the end of a Mega Man stage? Fuck that.
How many of us grew up wanting to be scientists an engineers because we thought NASA was the coolest thing since the Super Nintendo?
We have a terrible shortage of scientists in the US and a culture that ill-supports our nerdy kids. NASA serves an an inspiration not only to them, but to children all over the planet to get into the sciences and excel. The trickle-down technologies that come from NASA research are just a bonus.
Japan's been researching this sort of thing for hundreds of years. This is actually in perfect timing with my senior project in Japanese; I translated a textbook article about the history of the relationship between catfish and earthquakes in Japan. Catfish are the popular ones there, and once upon a time they actually were assumed to cause the earthquakes.
It's basically non-scientific common knowledge over there that some animals can predict earthquakes in some form. According to the textbook, people from seaside countries all over the Pacific are well aware that before a large earthquake, odd animal behavior occurs. That often manifests itself as animals being suddenly and uncharacteristically unruly, swarms of deep-sea fish pooling near the surface of the ocean, rodents appearing out of nowhere, snakes suddenly coming out of hibernation, or all other sorts of things of that nature.
A scientist in the early 1900s, Dr. Shinkishi Hatai, hypothesized that the reason catfish went so berserk shortly before an earthquake is that they could detect minute changes in Earth's telluric current. Another famous Japanese geophysicist, Dr. Torahiko Terada, apparently dedicated his thesis to, and showed a very convincing correlation between the 1930 Horse Mackerel catches and the Ito Seismic Swarm at that time.
Realistically, if you're making the gas chambers then you have decided your moral position by the business you are in. If you are making the actual tools of killing then there's a case that you have a moral duty to take care over how they will be used. But the further you get from that then the more your moral responsibility is diluted, to the point where it's lost in the noise.
And that's exactly the issue, here. Most people likely wouldn't care if China was somehow using existing Microsoft services to send disinformation and propaganda to their citizens. It's the fact that China is saying, "Please modify your existing software so that it sends disinformation and propaganda to our citizens," and Microsoft is saying, "Ok, sure. What kind of censorship would you like us to make for you?"
Regarding the wagonmakers analogy -- it's upsetting, but not a big deal if Nazis are using a wagonmaker's wagons to transport Jews to a fiery death. That's not the wagonmaker's fault, necessarily. What Microsoft is doing, though, is making a Jew-transporting wagon that is engineered for the purpose of sending Jews to their fiery death.
Seeing that I have been through public, private, AND home schooling, and I come from an extended family of both gifted and special needs children where home schooling has been really beneficial, I feel the need to chime in.
Definitely not all home schoolers are home schooled because of religious fanaticism. If I had to guess, I would say that most home schooled children are schooled that way because of a poor education at public/private schools. That poor education can go both ways -- a gifted child might not be stimulated enough at school, or a child with learning disabilities might not be taught at their ability to learn.
Home schooling is news for nerds because it is a topic that hits close to home for many of us. Many Slashdot readers have been home schooled or will home school their children, and I would venture to guess that the reason for that is because most of us here are not normal. Most of us here were not the popular kids at school, and while others preoccupied themselves with sleeping with as many people as possible or skateboarding, many of us watched the Discovery Channel.
Home schooling in and of itself isn't bad. Freedom to teach whatever you want lies at the very heart of home schooling. Parents are free to choose how to educate their children. There will be bad parents, average parents, and great parents, and passing legislation through in order to stop bad parents from badly parenting is as bad of an idea as passing legislation in order to stop parents from teaching children weird religions.
I, myself, have been home schooled, and I have also gone to public and private schools. I have met many people that were horrified that my parents could do something so terrible as to home school me; those sorts of people usually insinuate that home schooling destroys a child's capacity to interact with others socially and ruins them for the real world. In fact, with siblings 6 and 8 years my senior, I have always acted two or three grades more mature than my age, leaving me constantly outcast at typical schools. Being interested in science also further outcast me from having friends in public and private schools. My being home schooled has allowed me to enter my university at an early age (age 13 -- big thanks to IUPUI's fantastic SPAN program); unlike in primary schools, I am comfortable in a University setting, with much more freedom than in primary schools; because of my freedom, I was able to act on an opportunity to study abroad for 1 year; and despite my parents destroying my social abilities by home schooling me, I have been given awards for being a top student by my university, I have been accepted for a Summer Governor's Internship, and I have interned at NASA. This next year, I will be looking forward to entering graduate school for a PhD. in Geophysics.
I am not the only one with stories like this. IUPUI's SPAN program was created in order to help students like myself whose needs weren't being met by traditional schools. After my successful entrance into college at age 13, my aunt and uncle also took my cousin out of primary schools and enrolled him into the same university. He'll be moving on to a graduate degree in Electrical Engineering after next year. And another cousin, who has moderate Asperger's (among other behavioral problems), has always had terrible trouble fitting in at school and being taught in a way that he is able to learn. He didn't enroll in a university early, but his parents took advantage of many of the services and academies that cater to home schooled special needs and gifted children. This fall, he has been accepted for a full ride to a nice, private engineering university that is excited to have him in their Civil Engineering department.
Home schooling is not a bad thing. Like anything in life, there will be people who responsibly home school and people who irresponsibly home school. Stringent legislation will not prevent religious fanatic
I forget the case, but some judge already convicted a guy for the possession of "sexually-explicit e-mails" -- literary depictions of child pornography. If I recall, it was a case that had to do with a guy that had a shit-ton of shota manga, and he was convicted for the possession of child pornography over the manga and the "sexually-explicit" e-mails (which contained no images or ascii art -- just text).
It's amazing how quickly the constitution is shred into a fine pulp and turned into toilet paper when one doesn't have a good lawyer, or when the "child" prefix is applied to a crime.
Over the summer, I had the privilege to intern at NASA. Every little scientist's dream is to grow up and work for NASA, and I accomplished that dream for a short time. Why do kids dream of growing up to work for NASA? Because NASA is super-cool, and it does things that nobody else thought was possible or reasonable to do. It does crazy, impossible things just because it can, and to show the world that it can.
How many of you, growing up, were highly interested in space? How cool did you think NASA was? Just about every scientist I know says that they loved space and NASA as kids, and it's part of what made them interested in science. Though going to the moon has little to no hard, monetary return, the return that it does have is priceless -- inspiration for multiple new generations of children to grow up into scientists to work their hardest and do things that we think now are impossible.
Without NASA and billions of dollars spent into producing pretty pictures of galaxies and producing wild stories of the creation of planets, it will be a lot harder to convince children that the sometimes-unbearable difficulty and mundanity of science is worth the effort.
Until this latest fiasco, it has been unthinkable that a company would pull out of China. Companies have done so for human rights issues in the past (1990s), only to come back later in the decade. There's a general notion that foreign companies "need" China, and the Chinese government and Chinese people have become aware and arrogant of this fact. Most in China believe that Google is just doing what us Westerns know that the PRC does all the time -- blow off steam, make some noise, and continue business as usual.
There has been an increasing amount of articles in journals and newspapers discussing the possibility that though we have traditionally thought that we can't live without China, many businesses have starting to think that they can't live with China. Combined with its worsening human rights record, its worsening censorship, and its increasing disregard for anyone and anything but its own interests, the PRC government has been repeatedly sending the message that "play nice with us, no matter how much you dislike it, or you can't have a piece of our billion person pie". Google is sending the message that "you're pissing us off and we're thinking that it may no longer be worth it".
The point I'm trying to make, here, is that nobody has thought that a company would seriously consider pulling out of China since the 90s. The fact that Google is seriously considering leaving the country is groundbreaking, and it's something that companies all over the world are watching carefully. And for those that saying that it wouldn't matter to China if Google pulled out -- you're just being cynical. Google is no minor player in China. If their market share is actually 30%, as reported, that's more 115 million Chinese internet users, and that's better than Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, and AOL in the US combined.
With a project of this scale, and with the wallet and determination of the Chinese government, it's more than likely that an advanced Western IT company is going to be helping out with this monitoring task. They helped out with Iran, after all, which is much more taboo than helping out China.
The PRC is no farther up the evil scale than many other governments in the world, but they have more power to utilize their evil.
On the arrogance scale however, China probably holds a 10 out of 10.
Fundamentally the question cannot be answered as long as we cling to preconceived notions of what it means to be a man or a woman. "Man" is a social construct -- and from a scientific perspective there is no clear way to deliniate(sp?) between male and female. You can claim genetics determines that, and I'll show you XX men and XY women. You claim genitalia, I'll reply with birth defects. Any such distinction is arbitrary, and claims to the contrary are unscientific. The either/or proposition of gender and sex are social constructs. I'd also like to remind you that there are no studies proving that intelligence has any survival advantage whatsoever.
You can show me exceptions all day to what is usually defined as "males" and "females", but that's exactly what they are -- exceptions. If you have a room with one million classical "males", one million classical "females", and an XX male and an XY female, it doesn't mean that "male" and "female" have no meaning because the latter two exist. Biology is not Mathematics. One example of a falsehood doesn't collapse the whole idea.
I don't know what world you live in, but the one I live in, regardless of whether or not they go to school or have a career, most (not all) women eventually want to raise children of their own. In an ideal world, women could raise children AND have a career. We live far away from an ideal world on a place called Earth, where months out of work are a serious setback, and where raising kids well AND dealing with workplace responsibilities is impossible unless you sleep 2 hours a day.
You had me until
Right now, the overwhelming majority clearly oppose the creation of a liberal Western democracy. The Iranians love a brutal Islamic theocracy.
Oppression does not require the support of the majority. Do you think North Koreans like their government? Oppression requires nothing but a small amount of brutal people in power and just enough authority, whether that be authority by loyalty or authority by fear, to enforce their oppression.